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I won't read LLM authored fiction

mccormick.cx

61–70 of 118 posts

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#61

That is a perfectly valid opinion and POV to have. While I don't share it personally, I can totally understand why one has it. That does not change, that I personally actually do not care the slightest about the question of who or what wrote a novel. But that is just me, having studied literatur and fallen into a school of literary studies that held Roland Barthes' claim of the death of the author [1] in high regard.…

> I hated the question of teachers asking: "What does the author wanted to tell us with this story." Because -> The author never wrote that down. And deriving their intentions from a fictional text felt just like making shit up. You either hit the interpretation of your teacher or received a bad grade.

I think this might be the most pernicious strain of anti-intellectualism online: the idea that there is no subtext, that a text only communicates exactly what it lays out on the surface level. That's not at all what Barthes was saying; you've misunderstood him.

Writing is not a noiseless transmission of thoughts, and thoughts themselves are not totally uninfluenced by the outside world, and people do not always state exactly what they mean in the simplest possible words, and words are understood by the reader in ways that writers did not intend. At every stage, there is the possibility of subtext and context being present.

Your teachers weren't trying to get you to fix on the one perfect interpretation, because that idea (Barthes would agree) doesn't really make sense. Instead, they wanted you to interpret, explain, and justify in a complex and ambiguous space.

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#62
It's not impossible to skew an LLM into a specific style of writing, one to reflect the author's intentions.

I think that LLMs made everything easier, as in, lowered the barrier. With that, comes a natual inscentive to be lazy, and not implement your style of writing into it. This will mean the production of more "slop" articles but also a chance for great novels with the help of LLMs. As I say, both human and AI slop exists, as well as truly great things from both. Similarly to how before AI, we had "little to no code!" promises, "make your app with no experience", as well as the endless WordPress/"PHP scripts" promising "SEO optimization" and likes from everyone.

Except all these pre LLM methods were limited and could easily be ignored; now the machine can truly get "smarter" and output new content to the point where beginners can truly become something better (or output beginner quality work at mass) with little to no work, exactly as promised before.

What strikes me about (some, or most of, as I see nowadays) Anti AI is that you never really cared about the human before AI, it was all about quality. But only now do you decide to care about the human? If you truly did, won't you have cared about the human before?

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#63
post #15
post #9

How to detect which fiction, article, or review is created by fake AI or LLM? There are too many texts generated by LLM on Internet now. The experience of exploring Internet is very bad now.

It's often quite easy, because most people who author articles with LLMs do not bother doing any kind of post editing. Meaning you can see/build a mental map of common tropes[^1] for what to look for. Once you read perhaps two or three articles authored with LLMs you will not be able to unsee it. [^1]: https://tropes.fyi/

Yes but it's still like wading through shit to find the occasional gem. It's not hard to pick out when you work with LLM's a lot. But it's still a bad experience. Social media was already hard at work at killing the internet (or at least what the internet used to be). LLM's made it worse.

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#64
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does the author wanted to tell us with this story." Because -> The author never wrote that down. And deriving their intentions from a fictional text felt just like making shit up It’s an exercise in engaging intellectually with the work. It’s not about knowing for a fact what the author wanted to communicate. Art is about engaging with human emotions and thoughts, not about deriving specific facts.

True, but that does not mean that the average teacher won't grade you badly if your interpretation is completely opposed to their and what was discussed during lessons.

There are bad teachers, sure. There are also bad students who think that the issue was that they weren't being taught when it was actually that they weren't trying to learn.

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#65
post #22

I concur with the author. Personally I think I just won't read fiction produced after 2023. There's so much good literature already produced, why bother with the new stuff? I feel very sorry to any budding new authors. Maybe we are entering a literary dark age?

I'm interested in why you feel like this. Do you take this action because you can't trust traditional channels (blogs, established tradpub authors, Goodreads et al) to self-curate LLM writing out of the pool of available literature you would normally be aware of?

Yeah I think it boils down to trust issues. I can't know how the text was created. Anything created before 2023 I know that at least a human had to invest a significant amount of time to produce the story.

Maybe I'm a bit too reactionary though. Thinking about it some more I would absolutely read something if it was recommended by a trusted source (which in my case is almost always a human I know in the physical world).

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#66
post #9

How to detect which fiction, article, or review is created by fake AI or LLM? There are too many texts generated by LLM on Internet now. The experience of exploring Internet is very bad now.

Look at the publishing date. Unfortunately I don’t think we will have a more reliable way to do it

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Everyone borrows or steals from prior art We are products of our environment, we learned what art is by having other peoples art as reference to "what art is". So it's only natural that our own art is inspired by other peoples work. People usually do not directly steal an artstyle though and if so, they are usually called out for that. LLMs directly steal from artists works hallucinating them into a pile of stolen b…

You can't steal someone's art style because they never owned it in the first place. It's not copyrightable. It's good and right for AI to copy artists' styles - it can produce more work more cheaply for those who want it. If that affects the profits of commercial artists, so be it, that's the risk you take when you engage in business in the free market. Get over it.

Thanks for showing again that people on this platform have little to no empathy, only care about businesses and money and have no understanding of art in general :-) Shows why I don't befriend tech savvy people usually.

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#68

I would like to read "actual" LLM fiction in the same sense I would like to read fiction from a lion. I wonder if that kind of alien writing is even possible with this kind of technology. The RL process would have to be quite different at least and even then it is still using human content as the base. Anyone seen any good or even decent or OK fiction of this type?

Whenever people say they like AI music or fiction, I've only ever been able to determine they are something like the equivalent of people with no taste buds describing how delicious the gruel is.

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't steal someone's art style because they never owned it in the first place. It's not copyrightable. It's good and right for AI to copy artists' styles - it can produce more work more cheaply for those who want it. If that affects the profits of commercial artists, so be it, that's the risk you take when you engage in business in the free market. Get over it.

Thanks for showing again that people on this platform have little to no empathy, only care about businesses and money and have no understanding of art in general :-) Shows why I don't befriend tech savvy people usually.

Do you have empathy for rent-seekers in other domains when they get undercut by cheaper alternatives? Property investors? patent trolls? Record labels that own the rights to music from long-dead artists finally reaching the end of their copyright terms? Commercial artists are businessmen out to make a profit just like all those others I listed. They're not some magical monks that society needs to protect and shield from the struggles of normal life.

Re: I won't read LLM authored fiction

#70
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be easy then to link to some AI generated music that is actually good?

I would be impressed if you could link to some human generated music that everyone will agree is good.

I wonder if anyone anywere actually thinks Beethoven’s 9th is bad. But that’s not the point is it. I can link you plenty of music that was absolutely lambasted and despised when it first was performed and today is recognised as classics. Plenty of people hated while many loved it. Rites of Spring, Charlie Parker, Miles David and Coltrane where all moved people against or for, created energy, created something which changed the way we listen music today. It caused people to feel and react.

I have no idea if most new pop playing at the gym is genetated with this or that machine learning aid and I don’t care. It is all meh. And so is AI-generated music and therefore we will forget it.

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